Products
WORKFLOW
Workflow was conceived in the year 2000. The development of the framework and the first implementation was done over a period of two years. This application has taken twenty people to develop over this period of time. Research work has been done by
- Doing a lot of initial spadework on the functioning of any Research laboratory and the general framework of labs.
- Help was taken from consultants such that domain experience was with us during the development of the project.
While an attempt has been made to make this application as generic as possible, we felt the strength of the application lies in the area of customization. And therefore the customization scope within the application is still open ended. Work is continuing in this area and we are attempting to extend or enhance this system further.
We have used a number of parameters for the comparison of the solutions. These are listed below. We have also provided a brief description of each parameter. The parameters are divided into two different categories. These are the workflow capabilities of the solution and its graphical capabilities.
Workflow Capabilities
- Role-Based Routing: This is the ability to route a task to a job function instead of an individual. If individuals change job functions (which they do frequently), the workflow does not have to change.
- Relationship Routing: Many business processes are based upon reporting relationships. Supervisors do reviews, expense reports are reviewed by department managers, and so on. Therefore, the ability to route workflow tasks based upon reporting relationships is very important.
- Rules-based Routing: The ability to embed complex business logic in the workflow definition that defines routing based upon real-time conditions and data without the need for programming or scripting.
- Relative Routing: This capability allows a Task to be routed to a job function relative to the organization position of the initiator or some other person. For example, a company may have 3 divisions, A, B and C. Each division has a Quality Manager (QM). For a particular process, a Task must be routed to the QM for approval. Since there are 3 QMs, this cannot be done simply by naming the Job Function QM as the Recipient. If the initiator is in Division A, the Task must go to the QM for Division A, if in Division B then it must go to the QM for Division B, and so on. The Relative Job Function feature allows one to specify a Relative Job Function as the Recipient. Then the Task is routed to the job function that is in the same organization as the initiator or some other "seed" person in the process (i.e., the routing is relative).
- Parallel Routing: In every organization, there are many tasks that can be performed in parallel to reduce cycle time. For example, if five department managers are required to make a budget forecast, and each forecast is independent of the other, it does not make sense to route the budget forecast form from one department manager to another in a sequence. This only adds to the completion time since all of them cannot do their part in parallel.
- Ad hoc Routing: In many situations it is necessary to route a workflow task to a person or job function on an ad hoc basis. When designing a process, one may not have a prior knowledge of the recipient of a task. For example, an order is to be approved based on an account number by owner of the account. When designing the process one is not aware of what the account number will be for any particular incident. Therefore, one does not know who the owner is. A robust workflow product must provide a dynamic method of assigning recipients that should include user input, database lookup or some other application-specific method.
- Queues and Groups: This is the ability to route tasks to shared queues, such as a shared in-box in the purchasing department. Any buyer can select a task from the queue based upon availability. Likewise, in many cases a task must be performed by a group of people
simultaneously. This requires the ability to route tasks to a group. A robust workflow solution must support the "push" and "pull" method of assigning work.
- Process Rollback: In real business situations, people often change their minds. A capable workflow solution must provide a means of handling the situation where a decision was made at a step in the workflow, and then subsequently, when the process has gone forward, the user changes his or her mind. The process must be "rolled back" to accommodate the change. For example, an order entry clerk has placed a customer order and the order process has gone forward. Then the customer changes his mind about some aspect of the order. Instead of canceling the order process, rollback enables the process to be called back to a known state where changes can be made and the process can then move forward with the new information.
- Sub-Processes: A robust workflow automation solution must provide a means for a business process to initiate other business processes. Since business processes can be very complex, this feature ensures that these processes can be implemented modularly. This also
provides a mechanism for collaborative design. This feature must include the capability of transferring data from the parent process to the sub-process, and returning data when the sub-process completes execution.
- Escalation & Exceptions Handling: The ability to escalate a task if it is late is a basic requirement of workflow automation. It ensures that tasks do not fall through the cracks and cases are completed expeditiously.
- Exceptions are rampant in every organization. The larger the organization, the more exceptions or special cases there are. A workflow solution must have very strong exception handling capabilities offered as a part of the Administrator module, or as a part of the workflow client. For example, the ability to reassign a critical task from one user to another if the user is absent because of an emergency and his computer is password protected.
- Integrated Forms Designer: Forms are the user interface of a business process and are used for gathering and disseminating information. The ability to easily design and use intelligent electronic forms is, therefore, an essential feature of workflow automation. Some workflow products rely upon routing documents only. However, while documents are ideal for carrying free-form information, they are not convenient for summary or control information such as signatures, totals, destination addresses, list of required
approvals, etc.
- Web-based: A workflow solution involves a large number of participants. To easily reach all these participants and provide connectivity, it is important for a workflow solution to provide a Web-based interface. The Web-browser is available at every desktop and provides an excellent mechanism for connecting easily with the workflow server. Furthermore, for large-scale deployments, it is important to offer other features such as metrics and administration, via a Web-based interface. This reduces the overall cost of ownership.
- 3rd Party Application Agents: In real business situations, workflow tasks are performed by individuals or by other applications. The ability to call other applications to perform tasks at different steps in the workflow, and the ability to exchange workflow data with these applications, is an essential features of workflow automation.
- Maintainability: The workflow software that your organization must lend itself to easy and efficient maintenance. This is possible only if the solution is not only documented but is conceptually simple. Also the lesser the number of environmental components used , the better is the maintainability of the software.
- Platform Independence: Modern business environments have a variety of systems that work utilizes different platforms and technologies. For ease of deployment and use, the workflow solution should be deployable across a variety of platforms.
- Intranets and the workflow: The workflow is essentially the automation of routine tasks that are carried out in the organization. The corporate intranet has evolved as a powerful internal tool for dissemination of information. The possibility of mating the corporate intranet and the workflow enhances its power and ease of use many times over. In addition, this also leads to savings on cost and training.
- Signatures: Every business process has some degree of signature requirement. For most business processes, there are several required signatures. Thus, the ability to provide a convenient signature capability in some form is an essential requirement of workflow
automation.
- Simulation: Workflow automation is an application that involves a large number of individuals and desktops. Once a workflow process is automated, it is important to test it before deployment. Since it is not logistically practical to test it by actually going from one
desktop to another, the workflow automation software must provide some means of testing it via simulation on a single desktop.
- Process Documentation: The ability to document a business process is very important and indeed, is a key requirement of quality standards such as ISO 9000 or CMM. Workflow automation software must provide a means of generating documentation that is a requirement for the proper maintenance and support of the solution.
- Workflow Status Monitoring: This is the ability to monitor the status of workflow incidents. Ideally, this ability should be available to each workflow participant for incidents they or their subordinates have participated in, and to a centralized workflow administrator for all
workflow incidents.
- Authentication and Security: A workflow system must provide robust authentication and security features since it involves a large number of dispersed users as participants. When a user logs in to a client, the system must be able to verify who he is and if he is authorized. When the user approves a document, it is important to know that it was the user and not someone else. And finally, when information is transmitted as a part of the server, it must be secure from interception.
- Distributed User Administration: In a medium or large enterprise, it is not practical to manage and administer users from a central location. User administration must be distributed so that each manager can be responsible for the administration of his or her subordinates.
- Ability to Assign and Confer: In real life business situations, individuals often assign tasks for others to perform. They often wish to discuss a particular task with someone else and get their opinion. A workflow solution must provide some means of assigning tasks to
others and conferring with others.
- Upgradeability: Most solutions have frequent upgrades. In case the solution is deployed for many users, the effort involved in upgrading the software can be a challenging task. The upgradeability of the solution is an important factor in determining the merits of an application.
- Deploy ability: The ease of deploy ability of the application across scores (or hundreds) of user terminals is also an important determining factor in deciding the merits of an application.